Category Archives for Surveillance State

It looks as if Labor has caved and will pass the proposed data retention bill. You are now under suspicion. You are now under surveillance. You are no longer a citizen, you are a suspect, so it is time to start acting like one. Learn the tools which enable you bypass data retention, to communicate privately with your colleagues, friends and loved ones.

The most troublesome metadata collected by the proposed scheme is not your internet traffic, which has some exclusions; it is your phone, sms and location records. Switch to calling and messaging your contacts using the data connection of a smart phone, computer or tablet. Some of the best tools for this are:

The purpose of mass surveillance is not to catch criminals, evidence shows that is ineffective. The true purpose of mass surveillance is to ensure conformity. Don’t conform. Don’t give people your phone number, give them your xmpp address. When your friends call, ask them to install the RedPhone app and call you back. Head to the protest on Monday.

This is a draft still being written, so you might want to wait until it’s completed and reviewed by a third party to make sure I’m not giving any bad advice. It’s a guide for the lazy. If you are living under an opressive government (like Syria or Iran), or if you are a whistleblower, activist, or a journalist wanting to protect your sources, you can’t afford to be slack.

For the rest of us lazy bastards, here’s the shit you need to worry about (in order of importance):

losing your files

losing your accounts

losing your privacy

Losing your files

All your photos of family and friends. All your financial records. All your university homework. All that porn you’ve been stashing. The biggest computer security threat you’ll ever have to worry about is losing them. Every hard drive is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to fail. You could accidentally leave your laptop in the back of a taxi and never see it again. Recently there has been a spate of attacks where criminals will gain remote access to your computer, encrypt everything on it, and then demand ransom payment to decrypt it. However it happens the results are the same – you’ve lost your shit.

Thankfully preventing these problems is easy; I’ll show you how to back your shit up.

Losing your accounts

Your email. Your internet banking. Your Facebook, Twitter and World of Warcraft character. These are all “accounts” and you can lose them. If you choose a shitty password someone can just guess or “brute force” it. If you’re tricked into installing malicious software it can log every keystroke you press, recording your passwords. If you are directed to a spoofed version of a trusted website and you try to log in, you’ve just given the bad guys your password. If you use the same password everywhere you’re truly fucked.

Unfortunately there isn’t a single easy solution to these threats. Having a well calibrated “bullshit” detector is essential. Using a password manager and keeping your computer up to date with security patches will also help. Don’t get hacked, keep reading and I’ll show you how.

Losing your privacy

Take any private photos of you and your partner? Do you write a pseudonymous blog like “Belle de Jour” or at the other end of the sexual activity spectrum, “Nice Jewish Girl”? Don’t want someone going through the soppy love poems emailed to your partner? Want to complain about work to a friend over chat / IM without getting fired?

Remember that laptop you left in the back of a taxi? Someone could go through all the files on it. Browsing on an insecure wifi network could give you away to anyone within range. Depending on which country you live in, your ISP could be obliged to log your browsing history, where criminals will undoubtedly hack in and get access to it at some point.

The threat to privacy is a bit more esoteric than losing your files or accounts, because it isn’t obvious when it happens. When you lose your hard drive, you know about it. When someone steals money out of your bank account, you know about it. When Facebook gathers information about the websites you visit and sells it to other companies, you’re left in the dark.